Talk:Guarani dialects

Guarani Indians

And what about the Guarani indians? LtDoc 21:08, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

See Guarani. -- Curps 02:11, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Literal Unicode

Note that e-tilde, i-tilde, u-tilde and y-tilde are part of the Latin extensions for Vietnamese, and are thus fairly widely available in fonts for many operating systems. For this reason these characters were included in this edit. -- Curps 02:11, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Vowel harmony in Guaraní ?

Now I see there is some kind of reminiscent vowel harmony.. specially in negated conjugation: nderejapói, ndorojapói, but ndapejapói; so this is just before the "r".

What do you think?

I don't know about harmony, but Guaraní does have forward nasal spreading over vowels (the German version of the article mentions this, but the English one makes a very bad attempt at describing it). Basically, the occurrence of a nasal vowel causes all following vowels in the word to be nasalized. It's apparently a fairly common feature in South American Indian languages.

Perhaps someone should also add a better description of the phonology. Again, the German edition does a decent job of this. Perhaps I should cut-and-paste and translate? pgdudda 03:19, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Although it seems like it, this isn't related to vowel harmony. These sounds appear to be reminiscents of old forms of the conjugation prefixes, which were probably the same as the Tupi: a- (1ps), ere- (2ps), o- (3p), îa-/ña- (1ppIn), oro- (1ppEx) and pe- (2pp). The a- that appears before the pe- prefix seems to be an epenthetic vowel, there just to avoid a consonantal cluster. For more info about the Old Tupi conjugation, just take a look at this page, by Prof. Eduardo Navarro (in Brazilian Portuguese). But since I don't know much about Guaraní yet, perhaps someone with more knowledge about the subject could explain this better. XVoX 11:07, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

dʒ or ʝ or ɟ?

--N0thingness 17:09, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

They're allophones ([ɟ] and [dʒ]), or so is my understanding. Wouldn't be surprised if [ʝ] shows up too though. --Pyry 17:31, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Portuguese spelling

According to Portuguese rules on spelling (the same for Portugal and Brazil), words ending with "i" and having the stress on the last syllable have no acute accent ("´"). So, the correct spelling is "Guarani" and not "Guaraní". This rule is violated often, but it is still a rule. Velho 17:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

But the word Guaraní it's took from Spanish here. In which it's necessary tu put the tilde in this case. --N0thingness 01:45, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The conjugation and negation tables

The tables in the sections Conjugation and Negation don't have much information about the verb forms (different rows are probably for different person/number categories, which should be indicated), so I added tags asking for expert attention. Please edit the tables if you're familiar with Guaraní verb morphology. -Oghmoir 22:48, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I fixed the linguistic stuff, but the table is in such a bad shape that the whole formatting needs to be redone, sth like

number || person || Guarani pronoun || Engl || prefix || stem || pref+stem || gloss

Jasy jatere 23:14, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Guaraní as official language: probably in Mercosur, probably not in Bolivia

Checking the apparently informed Oficialidad del guaraní part of Guaraní Portal from the University of Mainz, it seems that Guaraní has become an official language of Mercosur, but it is not an official language at Bolivia -though in Bolivia there are intense political developments as to the status of the indigenous populations. But I do not actually speak Spanish (that section's of the portal language) to be 100% sure. Please check the information. --Michkalas 00:09, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, I have found something in English about the status of Guarani in Mercosur:

“ Real World Radio (RWR)

Guarani to be Declared MERCOSUR’s Official Language

23/11/2006 - News

MERCOSUR’s Ministers of Culture approved a request of the Paraguayan government for Guarani language to be declared as the third official language of the regional block, along with Spanish and Portuguese. MERCOSUR’s members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The resolution will be presented at the postponed MERCOSUR meeting, which will be held on January 18th and 19th in Brasilia city, Brazil.

As was expressed at the ministerial meeting, the initiative aims to “the integration of the region’s traditional communities”. The adoption of the language will require the simultaneous translations of the MERCOSUR’s official documents. Guarani was declared official language in Paraguay in 1992. It is estimated that 7 million people in the region speak this language. Paraguayan organizations have been demanding this for several months, trough a campaign that included thousands of signatures and messages, which were sent to the block’s presidents.

Sources: Prensa Indígena

”

[1]

So we have to follow the subject and see what happens.

As to the status of Guarani in Bolivia the only information I found, after a lot of searching, is two interviews of Evo Morales [2] and the vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera [3]. Their position is identical and is related to new costitutional assembly which has begun, on August 6, 2006, writing a new constitution aimed at giving more power to the indigenous majority: "government offices must be able to conduct business in both Spanish and the native language of their region" (Linera). They name "Aymara, Quechua, Guarani, and Bolivia's other Indian groups". But there is nothing more specific as to how this position will be included in the new Costitution. Anyway, this is an ongoing procedure and we do not know the outcome.

In Spanish Wikipedia, where it is also mentioned as an official language, there are poor evidence: a site stating, in fact, that the language is spoken in Bolivia, not that it is official.

So, if there are no opposite opinions or new information, I would remove the part about Guarani being official in Bolivia and wait for the political developments in the country.--Michkalas 15:27, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Latin letter G with tilde

Why is the Latin letter G with tilde, used in the Guaraní language, not encoded as a precomposed character in Unicode? --84.61.100.152 12:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

You'd want to direct that question to the good folks at Unicode.org...  ;-) pgdudda 22:08, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Guarani, not Guaraní

It is a shame that the name Guarani is mispelled in the article about Guarani. It is a rule in guarani that words can't have an accent (´) in the last syllable. Guaraní, as you spell it, would be the correct spelling if you want to write Guarani in Spanish, which makes no sense at all. --Mauricio Maluff 04:15, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I've just realized this rule doesn't even appear in this article. Any reason? --Mauricio Maluff 04:22, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Where did you get that rule from? FilipeS (talk) 21:22, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Official orthography as decided in Montevideo 1950. All words are stressed by default on the final syllable. This is not indicated in spelling. Exceptions are marked by an acute if oral or by a tilde if nasal. Since final stress is the rule and not the exception, it is never marked, i.e. there can never be an acute on the final syllable Jasy jatere (talk) 18:57, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moot. The proposal has merits, but the input was small even after the relisting. For consistency, please take a potential RM rerun to the "central" article at Talk:Guaraní , as the move would affect several articles and a category; i.e. no prejudice against reopening of the debate. Duja► 09:47, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

---

As per the comment above, I request that this page be moved to Guarani language, without acute on the i. The reason for this is that the official orthography for this language does not use acutes for words stressed on the last syllable, such as Guara'ni. The current misspelling is due to Spanish orthography rules, which have no bearing on the treating of a Guarani issue in the English wikipedia.Jasy jatere 21:44, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

This would really mean page moves for most, if not all, of the pages listed at Guaraní (disambiguation), so I think more input is necessary before making a decision here. Is there a WikiProject that can be asked about this? Dekimasuよ! 04:15, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't matter what the Guarani or Spanish rules are, stick to English usage (WP:UE). Although I would tentatively say move to Guarani, Ethnologue uses the accent. Please provide more evidence of English usage. — AjaxSmack 02:43, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, acutes don't even exist in English. Why would you use it only for this language? --Mauricio Maluff 02:42, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

"Most Paraguayans"

It definitely isn't true that most Paraguayans don't speak pure Spanish or Guarani. Most of the population DEFINITELY speaks pure Spanish on a regular basis. Only in a very familiar setting are many Guarani phrases and words thrown in with Spanish. However, it is true that it is hard to find speakers of pure Guarani. There is a large spectrum of the mix of two languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.214.250.195 (talk) 04:17, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Alignment

Does anyone have a source for Guaraní being (predominantly) fluid-S? All I can find seems to at least imply that it's split-S (i.e. most verbs can lexically only be marked one way) but a few verbs are fluid-S (i.e. can be marked either way depending on the semantics involved). References: Active-stative language; [[4]]; [[5]] (implied at least); [[6]]; [[7]] (implied) 71.13.148.220 (talk) 06:35, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

merge

Do we really need Guarani language, Guarani languages, and Paraguayan Guarani language? At least one of those would seem to be redundant, esp. if there's no appreciable development. It seems this article covers about half of Subgroup I. Is it ethnically rather than linguistically defined? kwami (talk) 09:44, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Redirected Paraguayan Guarani here, and dab'd the few places in this article that considered other forms of Guarani. kwami (talk) 21:23, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

According to this article, "Guarani language" is synonymous with "Guarani languages". Do we have any ref that Aché, Xetá, Kaiwá are more distant that Bolivian & Paraguayan Guarani?

When we say that "Guarani" is the only indigenous language spoken primarily by mestizos, do we mean all of Guarani, or just Paraguayan Guarani? Are most Simba, Chawuncu, Mbya, Ava, and Tapiete also mestizo? If not, then it would seem that some of this article should be merged to Guarani languages, and some to Paraguayan Guaraní language. Or part left here, and part merged with Paraguayan. kwami (talk) 22:14, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Kwami, I believe we have discussed this ad nauseam already. I vote strongly against a merger. As we discussed, "Guarani language" is a dialect continuum, which includes a number of dialects, of which "Paraguayan Guarani" is simply the most prominent because it has by far the largest number of speakers. "Guarani languages" refers to a group of languages which apparently includes two or three other small languages which are not usually included in the "Guarani language" dialect continuum. If you find evidence that the latter are indeed also part of the Guarani dialect continuum, then you can merge "Guarani language" and "Guarani languages". Barring that, things should be left as they are. Pasquale (talk) 01:05, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Without much expertise I would be inclined to side with Pasquale on this one. The same situation often exists in Mexico my area of expertise where a language is in fact a group of languages (dialect continuum) where each variety is deserving of its own article. However it is imperative that the distinction between "guaraní language", "paraguayan Guaraní langauge" and the larger group of "guaraní languages" be made explicit in the articles.·Maunus·ƛ· 01:12, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

It took me some time to find a ref that Ache is not intelligible with Guarani, so that Guarani (macro)language is not a synonym for Guarani languages. The second point still stands: Much of the material at Guarani language would appear to be specific to Paraguayan Guarani, and therefor should probably be merged into the latter, leaving the broader material at the former. (Eg, do the Mbya really call their language avañe'ẽ, are they really mestizo, do the grammatical forms really apply equally well to their language, etc.) Part of the problem is that the articles themselves are largely synonymous even if the clades are not.

It looks like the only part of the text that belongs here is the section 'Predominance of Guaraní' and the 2nd paragraph of the intro. In order to the page history with the article, we might want to move this to Paraguayan Guarani language, meanwhile moving that article here, and then copy over the one section that belongs here. Or we could cut and paste and leave the histories behind. kwami (talk) 07:23, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Official language in Misiones?

"Paraguayan Guaraní is an official language in the provinces of Corrientes and Misiones, alongside Spanish." But the Corrientes Province article says that it is "the only Argentine Province with an official language other than Spanish", and the article on Misiones Province doesn't mention Guaraní at all. Does anyone object to me removing the reference to Misiones in this sentence? NoriMori (talk) 17:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I also checked the same two articles in the Spanish Wikipedia, and they are in agreement with what the English Wikipedia says. So, I think you're right on this one. Therefore, no objection, as far as I'm concerned. Pasquale (talk) 19:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I just noticed that the article on Paraguayan Guaraní says the same thing; so I guess I'll take it off of there, too. Thanks, Pasquale. NoriMori (talk) 23:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)